I don’t think anyone can deny that the Web has changed the way people teach, learn, and do research. Of course, this doesn’t mean that everything we read online is true and accurate—far from it. But I believe that through honest discussion and objective collaboration, accurate and useful information is much more likely to be the end result of any educational endeavor.

For this post, I want to focus on one piece of advice given by those developers in that project, under the heading “Write4”.

The advice is: Publish what you learn.

As soon as I read that exhortation (which originated with this tweet5), I knew this was a project made by a group of people who cared about the Web and that they understand what it takes to move forward as developers, and as an industry.

Let’s explore those four simple words, because I believe that concept is at the heart of how much progress has been made in the front-end development niche. And it’s something that could help almost any industry, in any field.

Just Do It

Very few blogs start out with much traffic at all. Unless the blog is based on an already existing brand that has a lot of exposure, most blogs will begin with very few readers. Even Smashing Magazine, who now has millions of readers, subscribers, and followers, started out with nothing.

CSS-Tricks6 is another good example of a blog that started out as nothing, and has grown into a thriving, collaborative community. Its founder and curator, Chris Coyier, certainly couldn’t have predicted how much that website would grow. And I’m sure we could come up with additional examples of websites that went from zero to hero in a relatively short time.

Why did they become successful? Because they published what they learned. At one time I somewhat favored the view that too many blogs were being launched. But I think the benefits of so much being published in so many different places outweigh any drawbacks.

Of course, this is not to suggest that the reason you want to publish your thoughts is to “make it big”—that should be secondary, if considered at all. In fact, what you publish doesn’t necessarily have to be on a run-of-the-mill monetized WordPress blog. It could be a GitHub account, a Wiki-style website, a Tumblr feed, or even a bunch of quick tips on a simple Twitter account.

Which brings us to another important supplement to this theme. Immediately after the folks at Move The Web Forward told us to publish what we learn, they made an equally important statement.

Don’t Be Afraid To Make Mistakes

You might be thinking: “Wait. What? Me? Publish a blog? I’ve been coding websites for a measly six months (or some other ostensibly short period of time). Even if people visit my website and read it, my articles will probably get torn to shreds!”

That doesn’t matter. What’s important is that you recognize the value in researching, teaching, collaborating, and correcting mistakes. That’s why the Move The Web Forward folks went on to encourage writers to “keep your posts updated.”

“The number one thing that will make you better at writing JavaScript is writing JavaScript. It’s OK if you cringe at it six months from now. It’s OK if you know it could be better if you only understood X, Y, or Z a little bit better. Cultivate dissatisfaction, and fear the day when you aren’t disappointed with the code you wrote last month.”

In this case, Rebecca was talking about actually writing code, not writing about code. But the same principle applies: you will get better when you make mistakes and correct them.

And if you think you’ve made some progress and you have something unique and educational to share, don’t be afraid to offer it to one of the many design and development blogs that will gladly pay you for content.

Comments Are Part Of The Content

There are too many websites that view the readers’ comments as secondary content that is not nearly as valuable as what the author has to say in the main article. Every website should continually make changes or updates to content that is clearly shown to be incorrect. This shows that the publisher wants to provide accurate information, and that they respect the views of their readers.

In fact, you could make the argument that without reader comments, the quality of content on many design and development blogs would not be as strong as it is today. On my own website8, I’ve written so many things that were just downright wrong. In some cases, things can be a matter of opinion and personal preference. But in other cases, they’re just factually incorrect. In indisputable cases, I’ve always tried to post updates to articles and credit the commenters who pointed them out.

Teachers Learn By Teaching

Randy Rhoads9, a popular rock guitarist (who died in a plane crash in 1982), was well-known for being a guitar teacher. He once said10:

“I’ve been playing about 18 years and I started to get a style when I started teaching.”

In other words, he believed that his success as a guitarist was largely impacted by the fact that he spent time teaching his skill to others. The same can be true for any one of us.

I’ve learned so much from readers’ comments and from doing research on stuff that I plan to publish. I’ve even learned from content I never actually did publish. The Move The Web Forward project, once again, summarizes this point quite nicely:

“Teaching is a great learning tool as well. So, even if you are getting started in an area, you’re helping yourself by writing about it as well.”

GitHub Gets It Right

The collaboration level on many projects from the “social coding” website GitHub11 is truly amazing, and is something that shows how revolutionary the Web really is.

Think about a large project like HTML5 Boilerplate13. When that project was first released, many front-end devs were amazed at how much front-end knowledge had been packed into a single starting template. Many were even intimidated by it. But what it was when it first launched is nothing compared to what it is today.

Why? Because from the get-go the contributors to the project had the same attitude that Paul Irish expressed in the launch post14 of his blog:

“I’m very interested in your contributions… what else deserves to be in this base template?”

With those words, Paul began what might be the most important front-end development project in the Web’s short history. And the collaboration continues today. In fact, there have been over 1000 issues 15 opened and closed on that repo. All because Paul Irish—who has every right to never solicit feedback, because he’s so dang smart—encouraged collaboration.

If the author feels the advice is not accurate or best practice, than he should explain why. If it’s established that the point needs clarification and/or correction, then he should humbly accept this and post an update, crediting the person or persons that brought it up. Personally, I’ve seen too many posts where the author doesn’t make corrections, even when clear technical or factual errors are pointed out.

This doesn’t mean that “majority rules”—that would be ridiculous, and would probably cause more problems than it solves (particularly in matters of opinion, where often there are no hard-and-fast rules).

But if it’s a technical matter, then the author has the responsibility to make updates and keep the information fresh, practical, and relevant. This is especially important if readers are finding the article via search. The “copy-and-paste-but-don’t-read” mentality is common among developers looking for quick solutions. We all face tight budgets and even tighter deadlines, so the last thing we want to do is verify a piece of code’s quality by reading a 900-word accompanying article along with 50+ comments.

If you notice a lot of search traffic coming in for older articles on your website, that might very well be incentive to update those older posts, and ensure you’re not promoting something that you no longer believe is accurate or best practice. And this has a twofold benefit: It will get you even more traffic, and your readers will have accurate information that they can trust.

So let’s do our best to imitate collaborative communities like those found on GitHub and StackOverflow19, and continue making progress by correcting our errors. This will help all of us overcome the fears inherent in publishing what we learn.

The “TL;DR” Conclusion

If you don’t read this entire post, or if you take nothing else away from it, then just remember these points:

When you learn something, write about it, and don’t do it just to make money off it.

Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.

Teaching others will help you learn.

Encourage collaboration by allowing a free flow of constructive comments.

If you make a mistake, fix it.

I think this is a winning strategy for all those who are involved in design or development blogging, as well as tutorial writing.

When we’re willing to put ourselves out there, listen to what our peers have to say, and improve as needed, we will become better developers, and will help each other solve design and development problems in a more effective manner.

As this article suggests, your voice is just as important in this discussion. What do you think? Are you motivated to publish what you learn? Do you think collaboration and constructive feedback is an important part of moving the Web forward? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Louis Lazaris is a freelance web developer and author based in Toronto, Canada. He blogs about front-end code on Impressive Webs and curates Web Tools Weekly, a weekly newsletter for front-end developers.

Jonathan Snook

To expand further on your point about teaching, writing/speaking about something forces you to test your assumptions and explore things deeper than the initial problem you may have solved. It is this exploration where you really teach yourself even more of a given topic, while at the same time helping others learn.

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Filip Minev

I agree on 100%. It’s been only recently that I started blogging, but now – every time I sit in front of the white blank screen and see the black blinking cursor my mind goes wild. In order to write about anything, you should first concentrate and logically order all the bits and pieces in your brain so that you can write out the ideas in a simple and clear way. Which ultimately gives you better understanding on the topic you are writing about. It’s marvelous.

It was exactly because of that reason that I built. It’s a community website where people can share what they have learned about JavaScript with all its little tricks and gotchas, and ultimately people can learn from each other.

Hey, sharing is caring after all.

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Louis

As a side point here, there was something a bit eerie about this article, in relation to the section on “Teaching”.

I wrote this article, from beginning to end, on March 19 (although it had some revisions later). That was exactly 30 years to the day that Randy Rhoads (who I quote in the “Teaching” section) died. I’ve always remembered that quote from many years ago, so I had to track it down online somewhere, to verify it. But I had no idea that I was writing this article on the day he died. I only realized it the following day, when I was doing some edits.

Very coincidental, to say the least.

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Ian Devlin

There are plenty of people who do this and yet get nowhere with it because people don’t find their stuff which leads to no comments or feedback and ultimately they give up “publishing what they learn” as it appears to be helping no-one.

Sadly these days people’s blogs and thoughts often need to be “found” and promoted by sources such as Smashing Magazine in order to be noticed and to provide the kind of worthwhile feedback that you’re talking about.

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Brett Jankord

@Ian – This is exactly how I feel. About a month ago, I wrote on article on my blog about a technique I believe solves a lot of issues people have been running into with responsive web design. I tweeted the article with those I thought might find it interesting and help get it out to the rest of the web development community, though I’ve still yet to receive one comment on the post.

Everyone values feedback.I t’s hard for the creator to see the cracks in their work. This is why feedback is so crucial. It helps us improve. Maybe my idea is completely crazy, though without any feedback from the community, it’s hard to tell.

I don’t want to come of as complaining that my work goes unnoticed, though when you invest a lot of time trying to solve problems and don’t receive any feedback, it is discouraging. So I can completely agree with your idea, ” they give up “publishing what they learn” as it appears to be helping no-one.”

@Jonathan – I like to write my ideas down too. It helps me put into words exactly what I’m thinking and review it in a concrete fashion rather than just having it float around in my mind.

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Louis

What you’ve both said is true, and probably will be true for many writers/bloggers. To increase your chances of getting noticed, I look at it as a two-fold process, both of which I discuss in the article:

1) You should publish what you learn because teaching will make you a better student yourself.

2) Because it’s so hard to get noticed and be “found”, you should try submitting your article to sites that are looking for writers. Smashing Magazine has a pretty tough review process nowadays, so it’s harder to get published with them. But there are lots of sites looking for authors, so try those lesser sites first. Many are in the SM Network. The traffic from those sites will naturally draw visitors and SEO value to your own blog in your bio, and eventually you’ll start to get more traffic.

After getting some traffic that way, you’ll start to see some feedback. It takes a while, and some may feel it’s not worth the effort, but over time, with carefully researched articles your site will get noticed — even if it only gets a few hundred visitors a month.

But besides blogging, there are other ways to get noticed. Commenting on other blogs, commenting on GitHub issues, contributing to GitHub issues, getting involved in IRC chats, posting on forums, etc. All of this can eventually lead to more exposure. But it has to be sincere, and with the intent of helping others and learning more yourself. If you do it all just to make money and get noticed (and I’m not saying you guys do it for that reason), then it will likely fail.

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Richard Lee

Agree. I think having users engage your content is an important factor in the motivation to create more. Unfortunately there are many established sites “lifting” chunks and aggregating content. And although references are made the conversation remains on their site as they already have engaged community . And practices such as stripping backlinks and use of no-follow in an effort to prevent spam impacts any value that could be passed back to the source

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Martin

I been having a debate with some friends for a while, about minifying CSS / JS and not minifying it.
Obviously minifying it has its advantages, but by not minifying it you will give people the chance to look at your work and learn from it.
So now I have taken to minifying the CSS / JS but also leaving a comment with a link to an un-minifyied version for people to learn from and look at.

jamie

I too have just started to blog after being a web designer now for about 6 years or more – I have only managed to upload 3 posts to date (a bit rushed if I am honest) but find it difficult time wise to do the “real work” as you might say and then blog about it later. I think a few late nights a month are in order as I love writing about what I do and I love reading others work too :-)

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Niklaus Gerber

Thank you for the great article. I decided two month ago that the best way to learn new things is also to share them. So I started blogging again and my aim is to publish one article a month with stuff I learned. Thanks for the inspiration!

Ankur

Nick

This is a fantastic post and couldn’t agree more. The shared value to both reader and writer is phenomenal. This is becoming one of the biggest pushes in education and learning for both teachers and students.

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Stev Newbury

Very interesting article Louis. I fall into the “new blog” category; I launched 6 short months ago. I’ve been coding for 5 years now, yet still I learn each and every day! My aim has always been to pass my knowledge on, and this just cements the fact that I’m doing the right thing! Teaching others definitely improves your own knowledge!

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Gaëtan Renaudeau

This is totally true!
Sharing your knownledge learns you how to explain ideas, and helps you to understand things you didn’t expect you can re-use to improve your initial share!
But you also need to get feedback to ensure you are doing it right ;)

Ben

I’ve read a few comments about how its easy to get discouraged if you publish what you learn and don’t see traffic from the posts. My simple advice is: do it for the learning, not for the pageviews.

I started a website (abetteruserexperience.com) with a buddy of mine last summer. We wanted to learn more about UX. We agreed to each write one post a week and to do a podcast.

What that did was force us to talk through what we wanted to learn, to research it and to come back and talk about it.

For what it’s worth, it took about six months for traffic to pick up. We got lucky and have written a few articles that have been well received and that helped our traffic. Yes, I enjoy looking at Google Analytics daily, but our motivations for the website are pure: we want to learn and we want to communicate that learning.

The rest of it — getting known, getting work because of our site, and selling sponsorship all grew (to the extent that any of those things have happened) naturally our of our efforts to learn more about UX.

But it’s the learning that motivates us and gets us to keep up with our posting schedule.

Saurabh Kumar

I still remember that status update by Paul Irish – “Publish what you learn”. That was the day i realized it’s meaning and power. Now my have a purpose for my blog.. i mean i used to be always confused what to write. I’ll just add few more advantages that i realized when i started writing…

1. “when you ‘publish’ something it motivates you to write as complete and correct as possible” — this helps me learn the topic well and it’s fun!!

2. When I have an article I can easily tell my friend or someone to see my post, from where he learn with his own pace. You won’t realize but that helps me save my a lot of time.. :)

I more tip i would like to share here, I usually find it’s to hectic to find time specially for writing, so most of the time. I write while I am learning. Let’s say if i’m learning to use “Git”, i would draft my article while i explore and learn git. simple right. then in the end the last thing left is — “Publish” button.. :)

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Brent Leavitt

I like this. I’ve been borrowing from others knowledge and experience for over five years. I would be nothing as a front-end web developer without the experiences shared by other on the web. It is the one industry that is self-educating like none other.

I’ve always felt because I didn’t receive a formal education in anything related to the web, that my experiences and knowledge were sub par. Slowly, I’m shaking that off as I’ve started to contribute more on StackOverflow and elsewhere.

Joseph

Zielak

You have really encouraged me to start a small blog. I’ve been a developer for 3 years and i thought that just reading articles/e-books will help me learn more. But now, I start to believe that interaction with peers is far more important.

I’m reading this blog for some time now (this is my first comment) and I’ll definitely keep on coming back here :)

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thepandalion

Thanks for this post. I recently started blogging, and although I feel very satisifed and accomplished when I finish a post, when I tweet it etc and get no comments I get a little disheartened.. however I try and remember, writing it is beneficial for me to track what I have learned, and also to help me write better.

Funnily enough on the other end of the scale, I’ve always been a little worried about getting comments because although I welcome criticism as a chance to learn, some commenters online can be kind of nasty especially if you don’t know as much as them.

Your article is encouraging, and makes me realise I should keep blogging for myself and with what I’ve learnt. We are ALL learning and shouldn’t be worried about where we are in that massive learning process. I think we all have something useful to share and teach somebody else. :)

Victor Samuel Mosquera

Angie k

Great article. I am not a coder but this advice is relevant for anyone who wants to start blogging on a topic but doesn’t feel what they have to offer is polished or advanced enough. I am bookmarking this for those days I have to remind myself to just do it!!

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Renato Alves

First I would like to thank for the great tutorial, it came in a time where I was in doubt about creating or not creating a front-end development blog. There are so many related blogs online that I confess I was not that motivaded in creating one.

But your post gave me the courage and confidence to definitely start this project (blog).

I believe that teaching , or at least trying, to teach people what I learn in a great way to improve myself and help the community.

Shumona

wow! I was thinking the same thing. Always I try to keep some written documents of whatever I am learning everyday. Actually its more important for me than others to keep them..
Thank you for the beautiful post

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Maitreya Jagalur

Hi, I fully agree with the author about the things he discusses. I am also excited by the kind of comments and discussion that has come up afterwards. I have also started a project in college recently where we share what we learnt in college. I recorded some of the lectures and classes and it is going online.

I would like to rewrite this article for my area of study, that is journalism and media studies, where feedback and discussion is the lifeblood of good content. I am inspired and I will do some more research and write an post on my blog about collaboration, teaching to learn, in Media Studies.

Like some of the comments say, my blog is not yet so popular and there is little traffic, but the idea is to teach read, and learn, not worry about how many people read it and if you can make money with it.. Thanks and cheers

Maitreya

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Jordan Mercedes

Thank you very much for this article. It helped to bring clarity to some things that I’ve been thinking about. Mostly, the importance of just getting started and continuing to show up. Sometimes showing up and writing or sharing is the beginning of bigger things. Once we show up, you’ve helped us to understand what to do next: teach something that we’ve learned. The topic may be web design, or productivity or anything else. What we are able to share may help someone move forward in work and in life. And, I love the part about fixing mistakes. For some, and it has been for me, my biggest horror was making a mistake that everyone would see, now I realize that I can just fix it and thank those who pointed out the error. That’s extremely important.
Thanks again!

Mark Weston

There’s a book called We Think which is all about sharing knowledge and collaborating with others. It’s a few years since I read it, but there was a lot about how the web has facilitated this sharing and collaboration. It’s well worth reading.

I think the comment about h5bp is very true as well. It’s one the best resources for front-end dev I’ve ever come across.

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Sean Dooley

I have always thought about blogging my development experiences, mainly in hoping that it might help others. I greatly appreciate the time and effort that others have done in blogging about their experiences, as I know I have learnt a great deal from them.

This article has definitely encouraged me to blog more.

Great article!

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Scott Petrovic

I have been posting what I have learned for about 5 years now and it is a really great thing for a number of reasons.

1. Share and give back – How much have you learned from looking at blogs and forums? How much of it did you pay for? I probably wouldn’t be doing web design/development for a job if it wasn’t for the generous and open web community

2. The perfect cover letter – What better way to show potential employers what you have been up to and are passionate about? Posting your blog alongside your resume and portfolio is the best way to show people that you are passionate about what you do and you are a life-long learner. Even if you haven’t updated your portfolio in a while, if employers go to your blog and see you are still making posts and sharing, they will know you are staying current.

Thanks for the post. I am more convinced every week that blogging this way is the best thing you can do if you are serious about your field.

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Eric A Carter

I don’t know if it’s just coincidence, providence or strangely good karma for my recent actions, but I’ve actually just spent the last 4 hours setting up my own website specifically for the purpose of publishing what I’ve learned over the past 15 years as a hobbyist C++ coder, only to check my emails (after reorganising my accounts) and find one of my newsletters had this rather pertinent article as its feature.

Sure, it’s not web design, but the principle holds true no matter what you blog about. I must say Louis, you have hit the nail right on the head, because my site is intended to be a place where I can share the coding tricks and traps I’ve learned over the years, whilst allowing others to contribute to, improve upon or even contradict what I’ve posted. To my mind at least, PWYL is the heart and soul of the ‘open source’ idea, where everyone gets together and shares knowledge freely so that everyone can learn from it, including those who set out to teach in the first place.

Until I read this post, I was still nervous about creating such a site, with the main worry being, ‘Am I qualified?’ Your article and replies have just reassured me that I have in fact done the right thing by taking the plunge, and the biggest mistake I could have made would have been to chicken out. Thank you all.

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Siderite

I’ve started a blog a long time ago, when I realized I personally could benefit from a repository of accumulated knowledge. I have a short memory, you see. And I thought making it public would also help other people. I’ve even added a chat to help people out. But I digress… the thing is that after a while I started noticing an interesting pattern: sometimes I would google something and find it described with solution and everything on my blog. It was like a discussion between present and past me.

But there is also a problem with everybody publishing what they learn, and that comes from the fact that most people have a terrible way of learning: either by mechanically mimicking the results of others or by completely missing the point of their discoveries. Publish stuff enough and it becomes spam and we rely entirely too much on Google to weed out the trash.

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Hakim

Paul d'Aoust

Wow, a great article, both in philosophical/motivational terms, and in practical terms. I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while, but this gives me sufficient motivation to just do it already. I’ve already started to do this via StackOverflow, which is a great place to PAUL because the world goes there. But sometimes you need to address a question that nobody on SO has asked, and that nobody has written an article about yet. I’ve had this experience many times — after searching Google for a solution to my problem, finding nothing, and figuring it out myself, I think, ‘gee, I should write this down for posterity, to fill that gap for others.’

It makes me wonder how many people have found this solution in question already, and just failed to publish anything about it. Well, maybe I should be the one to just get off my arse and write it down!

Paul d'Aoust

Justin Avery

You hit the nail on the head in each and every way, and as you can see in the comments above it has hit a note with everyone that contributes to the web.

The best form of learning you mentioned was definitely teaching. After moving back to a smaller town from London I started a web standards meet up group to raise the profile and share/collaborate with other web enthusiasts. This initially meant running the sessions myself about topics I didn’t 100% fully comprehend…. and I can categorically say that is the single biggest driver to learn more about something. I urge everyone to present a topic to a group of people and as a result learn somethIng in more detail than you thought possible.

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James A

This is a fantastic and inspiring article. I have been toying with the idea of having a blog for ages, but never bothered for most of the reasons you mention, but mainly that no one would read it and if they did it would torn to shreds. But I realise now that I have been looking at it all wrong. I mean when I go to workshops, learn new things etc. I am always writing notes on scraps of paper but as a web professional it is high time I went digital! So why not publish those notes as blog posts. In the first instance it would just be for my own benefit and education, a place to crystalize my own thoughts, but if other people can find benefit from them and help me out along the way with a few insightful comments then that is all the better! I’m off to get started…

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